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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

We have talked about different novels being published on Twitter- 140 characters at a time (Read here and here). Yesterday, we stumbled across the twitter account @epicretold - the account which is retelling the Mahabharata on Twitter!

There isn't a medium that the Mahabharata has not been adapted for: Books, television, radio, film, paintings… just about every art form known to man has been used to narrate what is often regarded the greatest epic of all time.

Until Chindu Sreedharan, lecturer of journalism and communication at Bournemouth University in the UK, decided that there is still one left - Twitter.com. And so, on July 27, the former Mumbai-based journalist took to retelling the Mahabharata on the microblogging site, with 140 characters, as seen through the eyes of Bhim, the second of the Pandava warriors and best known for his superhuman strength.

His challenge, he says, was "to see if a complex, lengthy narrative can be adapted to something as "pop" as Twitter, for a different generation." He did not want an omniscient narration, he says, as "using a first-person point of view makes the tale a lot more easy to tell - the reader needs to be told only what the protagonist - Bhim - is capable of knowing, seeing." And so, it is an adaptation of the epic for the Twitter generation.

In field notes on epicretold, Chindu says "Which brings me to the caveat. epicretold needs to be seen as an experiment in social media, not in the Mahabharata. It does not capture the philosophical richness of the epic, nor does it purport to have literary merit. It is simply twiction, nothing more".

We have talked about different novels being published on Twitter- 140 characters at a time (Read here and here). Yesterday, we stumbled across the twitter account @epicretold - the account which is retelling the Mahabharata on Twitter!

There isn't a medium that the Mahabharata has not been adapted for: Books, television, radio, film, paintings… just about every art form known to man has been used to narrate what is often regarded the greatest epic of all time.

Until Chindu Sreedharan, lecturer of journalism and communication at Bournemouth University in the UK, decided that there is still one left - Twitter.com. And so, on July 27, the former Mumbai-based journalist took to retelling the Mahabharata on the microblogging site, with 140 characters, as seen through the eyes of Bhim, the second of the Pandava warriors and best known for his superhuman strength.

His challenge, he says, was "to see if a complex, lengthy narrative can be adapted to something as "pop" as Twitter, for a different generation." He did not want an omniscient narration, he says, as "using a first-person point of view makes the tale a lot more easy to tell - the reader needs to be told only what the protagonist - Bhim - is capable of knowing, seeing." And so, it is an adaptation of the epic for the Twitter generation.

In field notes on epicretold, Chindu says "Which brings me to the caveat. epicretold needs to be seen as an experiment in social media, not in the Mahabharata. It does not capture the philosophical richness of the epic, nor does it purport to have literary merit. It is simply twiction, nothing more".

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